Electronic Arts treated The Sims players to some news on Project Rene this week, the new Sims game announced last year that’ll be the next mainline game in the franchise. Grant Rodiek, the game director working on Project Rene, shared an update on the game that confirmed playtests are already underway and that the team has plans for more of those in the future to incorporate player feedback into the development of the game. Project Rene is still years out, however, so these playtests and occasional updates like this one are what players have to look forward to currently.
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Rodiek spoke about Project Rene around three minutes into the video below where he confirmed the news of playtests and that those kinds of tests have actually already been happening. He tempered expectations for a timeline for this game early on in the conversation by reminding people that this project is still years away.
“We are absolutely thrilled to finally put this experience in the hands of some of our players,” Rodiek said. “Well, a small part of the experience. What we’re doing is early days playtesting, and this is just the start of an incredibly long journey. There’s a lot to do, and I’m talking years out, but it is exciting. We’re moving and things are finally starting to happen.”
Rodiek said these playtests have consisted of small parts of the game being put in the hands of “a limited number of people” to see what works and what doesn’t. For these first playtests, that process consisted of letting people try out the Apartment Customization feature where players place and manipulate pieces of furniture to customize a space to their liking.
As for the current and future state of Project Rene, Rodiek laid out the plans the team has in mind next.
“Right now, we are really focused on analyzing our recent playtest so that we can use that information to make the game better. We have a long path ahead of us to make Project Rene awesome. But right now we need to introduce our tools to our players in a better fashion. We need to make the mobile experience more accessible, and we need to continue to experiment with how we can curate and recommend UGC content that other players have made to other players, so that you find the best stuff that will make your game better. So, there’s a lot there that we need to figure out to put into our current build. So, again, it’s really early days. We are trying to analyze our last test and really see what we learned and what we could do about it to make the game better.”
The Sims players can expect “regular updates” on Project Rene via Summits and future tests, Rodiek said.
